Week 1: Goodbye desk!

Just a quick update: one of this week's tasks was to get rid of something. The Apartment Cure book said the bigger, the better. So with Cara's help, I got rid of my desk! My bed now has space on both sides. I didn't realize how cramped I've felt.

Week Zero of the Apartment Cure: Are slobs born or made?

My bedroom and living room today.

For most of my life, except for a six month period in sixth grade when I decided that I could become neat by covering my room in tatami mats and sleeping on a futon and covering the overhead light with a red plastic lantern, I have been a slob. Eventually, my mother gave up on getting me to put my clothes in drawers. She got me two boxes: one for my clean clothes and one for my dirty. I sat in a pile of clean clothes every morning to pick out my outfits until I left for college. Was I born this way? Or did something make me a slob?

My family was messy growing: my parents opted for a creative household instead of a neat one. We got to leave the living room in fort configurement for days on end. And my sisters and I are all quite crafty. But they are both neat. Even my parents are neat now. I am the last vestige of laundry piles and overturned furniture. Perhaps I am the slob scapegoat: the rest of my family can be neat because I express the mess for all of them. Well, should they start to leave their clothes on the floor and papers all over the living room floor in the next few weeks, we’ll know my theory was right.

I like to think in the past two years I’ve progressed from the day my friend Megan found a tiny frog living in a curtain in my living room. Currently there is only one fork in the kitchen sink and only a couple things on my bedroom floor. But I am for the most part still living in chaos. I have to look for my course syllabi every time something is due. I file my mail using the pile system. The thing is: I hate messes. But that hasn’t stopped them yet.

Enter the ear infection. Two weeks ago, I got a double ear infection that is finally on its way out. In my moments of worst pain, I decided that I needed to get my room in order or else my life was going to end up as clogged as my ears. Then my friend Jamey posted a link to the Fall Apartment Cure on my Facebook page.

And so I begin. Eight weeks to transform my living space from a place that makes me feel guilty and like I never really left my early twenties into a Tigerland oasis of adulthood.

What I've learned the past three weeks.

I started a PhD program at LSU a few weeks ago and I forgot how much reading there is in grad school. And how grad classes thrust me into the fun fireworks of my brain and make me feel demoralized, unaccomplished and idiotic. All in the same few moments.

But mostly I have learned in the past three weeks that I am not reading books. Nor am I reading articles. I am not reading words or sentences or paragraphs.

I am reading texts. I am scouring texts! I am contextualizing texts! I am amazing others with my superhuman ability to find the flaws in texts! Texts! Texts! Texts!

Punctuation.

How Was my Trip North?

Well,

I went to Buttercup in Manhattan, the famous cupcake store opened by the ex-lover of the Magnolia owner (of Sex and City fame, when Magnolia owner and Buttercup lady broke up they had a public fight over who first made a hummingbird cupcake.) So I had to try it. Dude, you can buy cupcakes and cheesecake that crappy at Stop and Shop or Target. The frosting is flourescent (never a good sign). The peanut butter cheesecake tasted like it was made from an instant cheesecake mix. I had two bites of my spice cupcake, then fed the rest to the pigeons that live on my sister's roof. At least they enjoyed it.

And Kudos to Boston. Closing the one exit to the airport from the Expressway provided stimulation my 4 am drive to the airport might have otherwise lacked. Joke's on you Boston. I made the flight.

P.S. If you're wondering why the font and title look so awesome, thank Sean. Thanks Sean.

Why Does Moving Suck so Royally?

Is it the PMS or the fact that I hate packing a suitcase let alone a whole apartment up? I just constantly feel like I can't get it organized the way I want it to, so then why bother? I have these fantasies of labeled boxes, stacked, tetris like with my things. My FAVORITE things. Unfortunately that's most of my things.

If my friends hadn't come over for packing party two weeks ago I'd be screwed. But there's still SO MUCH STUFF. If Bobbi hadn't come over tonight, I would have spent it watching To Love, Honor and Betray on Lifetime. The bad acting, the dramatic music, and oh the dialogue. But instead Bobbi helped me empty the dresser I have to get rid of since it won't fit in my new smaller (but more expensive, but has a pool and a porch and central air) apartment. We discovered I have a billion pairs of fishnets most of which I never wear. And the identical brown shirts. Lots and lots of brown. Throwing away is supposed to free you and be symbolic and the first ten or so bags were, but now it's an admission of defeat. Everything I buy comes with this bizarre childish fantasy that somehow if I can just find the right clothes or tights or shoes everything in my life will click. The three bags of stuff for the goodwill from one dresser and some shelves: testament to how wrong I am about that. Is it so emotional because stuff I don't use makes me feel greedy and foolish, each a soft piece of defeat? Or because I can't give it up, this belief in a platonic ideal of a wardrobe that will fix me? In the bottoms of the my drawers I find clothes that I forgot existed, but when I see them I can remember where and when and why I got them (and if they were on sale or not).

Fanatasy lives. In mine I'm neat. Organized. And I don't space out during conversations. I don't spend hours watching Tv. I do the dishes right away. I write every day. And exercise. Ok, so that sounds like the type of person I wouldn't get along with. In fact it might be the type of person I'd find myself irritated for hours afterwards just because they were so damn chipper when they said hello. But maybe that's why moving sucks: digging around in my fantasy lives and realizing that I can't measure up. And I'm the one making myself miserable. But will realizing any of this making packing tomorrow suck any less? I doubt it.

Alternative Grains for Swingers

I made some biscuits today with buckwheat, millet and whole grain flour that had been soaked in kefir to neutralize the wicked enzyme inhibitors in whole grains. Yes grains may seem healthy but according to Sally Fallon , nutritionist extraordinaire, whole grains unsoaked will attack your systems like Red Sox fans after they've won the world series (why do they get so violent? What is it about New England that makes people break stuff when they're HAPPY?). I digress. I soaked those mofo's and then baked them and ended up with biscuits the color of paper bags, only softer and perhaps a bit more bitter. Nothing lots of butter and honey wouldn't fix. So now I have a freezer full of paper bag biscuits instead of a revised thesis.

Last week I took it (yes, it, my thesis with it's contrived ending) out to work on and the mother board on my computer died and I couldn't work for a week. Today, I had my computer back so I made biscuits. And coconut kefir. Oh and last night I bought so many shoes on zappos that my credit card company called me at 7:30 in the morning to see if my card had been stolen. No, I told Bank of America, after answering a multiple choice quiz about streets I've lived on and zip codes I've inhabited, no one stole my credit card. It was I in a black-out shoe buying frenzy. They will be returned. Every last gorgeous pair.

Brooklyn, measure of all things worth attending.

Why oh why do I keep reading the Kane? I'm already pissed off enough in my life, but sometimes my regular angst isn't enough and I read things like the blog-which-shall-not-be-named. The Kane happens to be using Brooklyn as a yardstick of all things fun to do in Baton Rouge. As in commenting that an event was good because it was Brooklyn-esque. Oh, does that mean everyone there was oozing attitude instead of sweat? And yes, Cokane, I know it's so wacked that Baton Rougites actually do cool things besides wearing purple and gold and drive around looking at abandoned buildings and eating crawfish and funneling beer, but SURPRISE they do.

1) I love Brooklyn but if things in Baton Rouge were Brooklyn-esque, no one would be dancing or smiling or having duels with roman candles. Nor would a Brooklyn New Year's Eve party include the tying together of four (yes FOUR, geaux Scott) artillery shells. We crossed the streams and we paid the price with our clothing and some of us might have ended up with bruised legs and burns but wasn't that better than standing around in itchy sweaters with weird ass bandanas around our necks being cool?

2) Where else can you not be packed and then have stuff in your apartment moved out by random strangers who come by and haul away 300 pound elleptical machines, then later invite one over for beans and corn?

and

3) Ok Advocate, since when is hating on Baton Rouge NEWS? Am I a jealous writer who blogs out of spite? Perhaps. But seriously. I'm from Massachusetts. I bitch about everything and yet I have found a way to love this place where at 1 am I am sweating like...like someone who lives in Louisiana. Before I moved here, I had no idea the places sweat could trickle. Like from my stomach. Who ever thought stomachs could sweat?